BT Joins New Global Alliance Bringing Real Time Digital Insights From The Store And Across The Supply Chain

IRVING, Texas, Jan. 18, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- BT today announced it is a founding member of the Acuitas Digital Alliance, bringing together like-minded technology innovators determined to bring the full benefits of the new digital era across the entire supply chain, all the way to the physical locations where customers do business. The Acuitas Digital Alliance demonstrated its first solution, BT In-Store Visibility, today at Retail's BIG Show, the National Retail Federation's annual conference, with technology provider Intel and fellow alliance founders NexGen Packaging, RetailNext and SATO Global Solutions.

The Acuitas Digital Alliance is a ground breaking initiative focused on providing a secure, cloud-based and future proof solution for businesses that want to take real-time advantage of big data and the Internet of Things to optimize operations throughout their entire supply chain while better engaging with their end customers.

The Acuitas Digital Alliance brings together leaders specializing in networking, hardware, software, analytics, content management, security and cloud services to integrate a wide range of technologies, such as IoT sensors, software and analytics, into a single comprehensive solution. This will allow organizations to optimize supply chain efficiencies, improve employee performance, cut waste and better manage compliance requirements. This will also help predict customer behavior and create a great experience for consumers, including in physical locations such as stores.

Although many IT solutions already exist to manage such environments, they fail to integrate with one another. Retailers and other similar organizations are forced to work with a patchwork of technologies that reduce performance and isolate in separate silos the data captured by each device at each stage of the supply chain and at points of sale. The result is an environment that offers a very limited view of consumer behavior and poor insights on how to improve on-location experiences and operations.

BT In-Store Visibility will be the first solution developed by the Acuitas Digital Alliance and addresses the needs of retailers who want to bring their physical stores up to the same level of ease and quality of experience for customers and staff as their online outlets. This also allows them to ensure consistency across all their sales channels. Existing IT solutions simply do not deliver the comprehensive real-time functionality, data and insights needed for that type of 'digital' in-store experience. It's one of the fundamental problems that the Acuitas Digital Alliance is focused on resolving.

Bas Burger, President BT Americas, said: "With ubiquitous connected devices and a generalized trend towards online dealings, organizations expect much more insight from their supply chain and from their interactions with customers. At their end, consumers also expect much more from their real world experience. The Acuitas Digital Alliance brings together the expertise and innovation required to integrate separate technologies into market-leading solutions addressing those expectations. The Alliance's solutions will simultaneously address customer experience, employee experience, business operations and insight. With unmatched global networking, cloud and integrated services expertise, BT is a key contributor to the success of this new digital ecosystem."

NOTE FOR EDITORS AND VISITORS AT RETAIL'S BIG SHOW

The Acuitas Digital Alliance demonstrates BT In-Store Visibility on BT's stand (booth 1143) at Retail's BIG Show in New York City from January 17 to January 19.More on: http://www.acuitasdigital.com/

About BT

BT's purpose is to use the power of communications to make a better world. It is one of the world's leading providers of communications services and solutions, serving customers in more than 170 countries. Its principal activities include the provision of networked IT services globally; local, national and international telecommunications services to its customers for use at home, at work and on the move; broadband, TV and internet products and services; and converged fixed/mobile products and services. BT consists principally of five customer-facing lines of business: BT Global Services, BT Business, BT Consumer, BT Wholesale and Openreach.

For the year ended 31 March 2015, BT Group reported revenue was £17,979m with reported profit before taxation of £2,645m.

British Telecommunications plc (BT) is a wholly-owned subsidiary of BT Group plc and encompasses virtually all businesses and assets of the BT Group. BT Group plc is listed on stock exchanges in London and New York.